Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin, No. 2:25-cv-05605-MEMF-SPx, C.D. Cal. (Aug. 14, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym admonished government counsel of record on August 14 for relying on ICE and its agency lawyers to run discovery, for accepting the agency’s representations without verifying them, and for passing false representations to the plaintiffs. She warned that counsel may face personal sanctions if the deficiencies continue. She also sanctioned ICE under Rule 37(b) for failing to comply with a January order that had required it to redo its searches and collections.
Counsel had negotiated search terms with the plaintiffs in February. By his own account at a June meet and confer, he did not know which terms ICE had run until he read the agency’s declarations. The search was long finished by then.
What Happened
The January order had directed ICE to produce all documents concerning fifteen enforcement operations, redo its searches, collect targeting and arrest documentation, and supply affidavits detailing the collection process. The declarations it provided in June disclosed how far short the search had fallen.
ICE had run eleven individual names and eight alien registration numbers, each in a single written form. The names covered five of the fifteen operations, the court found, and the date range excluded the last three, which a December order had already required. ICE searched email, government phone texts, Teams messages and OneDrive accounts, and the court noted that the search appears to have excluded other messaging applications its agents used. Each government phone was exported as a single PDF report, which the court stated eliminates metadata and combines separate documents.
One agent’s message chain was produced from a second agent’s phone but never from his own. Counsel told the plaintiffs the phone held nothing responsive, relaying what the agency had said. The plaintiffs found the messages when they examined the phone at his deposition.
The Court’s Analysis
ICE did not dispute that it had failed to obey the January order, so the argument was about the remedy. Rule 37(b)(2)(A) requires only a failure to comply, the court noted, and willfulness, bad faith and fault come into it only for terminating sanctions. ICE’s eventual agreement to run the searches properly, the court stated, “does not obviate the need for sanctions.”
A person may be referred to by first name, by last name, or by initials, the court observed, and a registration number may be written several ways. Searching only the full legal name and one number format, it concluded, had no reasonable basis. Counsel, the court added, “are experienced enough to understand these search terms were unreasonably restrictive.”
The plaintiffs also asked the court to admonish counsel of record, contending they had left discovery to ICE and its agency lawyers in breach of Rule 26(g). Counsel of record are responsible for coordinating their client’s discovery, the court stated. They need not supervise every step, but they must make a reasonable effort to assure the client has provided all responsive materials. The declarations indicated that agency counsel controlled the process and dictated the search terms. Counsel of record then accepted the agency’s account of the missing messages and repeated it, which the court found made those representations false. Quoting a recent Southern District of New York decision, the order calls that arrangement “self-collection that falls short of the requisite standard for compliance with Rule 26.”
The court ordered ICE to put its collection design on the record a week before the production is due. Its status report must disclose the custodians and how ICE identified them, the agreed search terms for non-phone ESI, and the sources it will search. Production itself must preserve metadata, and the new affidavits must state that their authors read both orders.
Why It Matters
Negotiating a term list with the other side establishes what was agreed, not what was executed. Counsel who cannot say which terms the client ran is not positioned to make the reasonable effort the standard requires. Ask for the terms as run, in writing, before the collection declaration is drafted.
A collection declaration is evidence about the search, and opposing counsel will read it that way. This one supplied the term list, the date range and the platform inventory the court’s analysis then used. Draft it expecting a judge to test each term against the way the custodians write.
A name recorded one way is not a search for that name. Custodians write first names, last names, initials and identifiers in whatever form is convenient, and a list built from one form will miss the documents that use another. The same holds for the applications collected, where a declaration is what proves an application was searched at all.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
